CLEVELAND, OHIO
AUGUST 2019
“Why don’t they just kill him?” T asked as I packed for Ohio. “He’s a bad guy. He’s an asshole.”
My older son is not an angel, but he wants to be a Navy pilot, and swearing is not his thing. I knew he must have been angry, confused. T loves Black Panther, Transformers, the Avengers…the military. In those worlds, the solution is you kill the bad guys.
“Because as a society, we judge ourselves by the humanity with which we treat the worst of our assholes,” I said. “It’s easy to say just kill someone bad. I think that too sometimes. But who decides that? When does it stop? And then what makes us different from someone like him?”
“That he’s an asshole.”
“First of all, ‘asshole’ does not begin to describe Sam. You can work on your vocabulary. More importantly, there is no clause in our Constitution that says, ‘except for assholes.’ You treat an asshole with dignity not because they’re worthy of it but because you have dignity. It’s called due process, and it means we should all be treated fairly under the law.”
“What’s justice?” asked my increasingly politicized Black son, who both made signs for BLM protests and still played with Transformers. “What’s fair?”
I was supposed to have a developmentally appropriate answer for that. I know I used to. I went for the hug instead, because nothing came to me.
Only a small percentage of criminal cases resemble a classic three-act piece of theater with a crescendo of redemption. We all love it. Holland loves it, with his, “You can’t handle the truth!” Silverman loves it, and she actually does it, but she’s the exception.
What’s not to love? Wave a magic gavel, say that order prevails and justice is something more than an interesting abstraction.
Legal documents are a gauntlet of loopholes and stonewalls, and I wasn’t the legal genius I’d secretly suspected myself to be. How could you read this shit, much less write it, without wanting to drown yourself in a bucket of your own tears? Give up, call four lawyers you know, and ask them to explain? You’ll get four different answers.
I had learned by then that if I could just hang out for a minute with a police report, a coroner’s report, a bazillion-page legal document—all essentially in a foreign language—it would eventually click. The click wasn’t usually a conclusion; it was whatever I was missing. I stared into the bowl of alphabet soup until the letters started to make words, which made sentences, which told a story.
The proceedings in Ohio weren’t a nail-biter. He did it. By Skype, he’d plead guilty to two murders in Cleveland, then do the same in Cincinnati. His lesser charges would be dismissed, and he’d be sentenced. I was more interested in who might attend.
Deputy DA Richard Bell had indicted, though he could more cheaply and easily have exceptionally cleared the cases. It took some oomph on the part of the Cleveland DA to pursue this level of public accountability for the murders of Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans and on that of Cincinnati DA Joseph Deters’s office for the murders of Annie Lee Stewart and Cincinnati Jane Doe.
I had spoken recently with Detective Kellyanne Best. I’d heard about her from Sam—she was his new best friend, but he told me not to be jealous. We’d all live together in his palace in heaven. Best was warm and empathetic, looking for the checkable facts but willing to talk for hours to get even one. He’d read her letters to me, so I can speak to her pitch-perfect rapport, sharing just enough about her lasagna and love of football. She solved two of Sam’s thirty-year-old cold cases.
“How many detectives do you have in your cold case department?” I asked her.
“Me.”
I got that answer from detectives all over the country. Most departments didn’t have a cold case anything. Cold case solves were more often than not driven by passion, curiosity, and that unidentifiable thing that draws some of us backward, backward, backward.
An unidentified victim remained in both cities.
The night before the trial, I quizzed my friend Jon Feldon, a brilliant and passionate public defender. I always paid for his legal advice with a shiny nickel.
“They worked all this out. He’s in front of a judge in a courtroom. The judge is going to hear the plea and sentence. Okay, so in your case, it would be an alien invasion if anything else happened, right? The judge might phone it in, or he might thoroughly explain the proceedings to your guy. You’re going to be there. That’s press, and that helps. I hope he does. You’ll find it interesting.
“So your guy states for the record that he is making an intelligent and knowing decision, of sound mind and all that. Understands waiving his rights, jury trial, self-incrimination. Hang on…”
Dishes clattered into a sink in the background.
“A good judge will make sure your guy understands the proceedings and potential consequences. If that’s all good, he’ll be sentenced. Talk about narrative,” he said. “When you’re a public defender, you fight for your client with all you have, and memory is a tricky thing.”
“Explain.”
“You have to believe in a narrative to sell it. You believe your story. Or it’s his story, but you’re telling it. It can take some emotional acrobatics. What you need to understand is the other side is doing their job to fight for him too, with all they have.”
“What now?”
“They’re fighting for something that is human and essential. Justice. He is a human.”
“They’re fighting for him, theoretically.”
“Correct. Y’know, one connection between writers and lawyers. We witness or arbitrate the human condition and somehow still have to find a way to be a part of it.”
In expectation of the upcoming trials, the FBI announced more than sixty verified cases. I wanted to understand what put the CLOSED stamp on a file in terms of long cold cases. What were the evidentiary expectations? What could make a case for reasonable doubt? What was the impact of community, media, departmental interest, clearance rates?
According to the FBI’s website on the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, there are basically two ways to clear a criminal case: by arrest or by exceptional means.
Cleared by arrest
In the UCR Program, a law enforcement agency reports that an offense is cleared by arrest, or solved for crime reporting purposes, when three specific conditions have been met. The three conditions are that at least one person has been:
Cleared by exceptional means
In certain situations, elements beyond law enforcement’s control prevent the agency from arresting and formally charging the offender. When this occurs, the agency can clear the offense exceptionally. Law enforcement agencies must meet the following four conditions in order to clear an offense by exceptional means. The agency must have:
Examples of exceptional clearances include, but are not limited to, the death of the offender (e.g., suicide or justifiably killed by police or citizen); the victim’s refusal to cooperate with the prosecution after the offender has been identified; or the denial of extradition because the offender committed a crime in another jurisdiction and is being prosecuted for that offense. In the UCR Program, the recovery of property alone does not clear an offense.
From my hotel room, I looked out over the sunset-painted Cuyahoga River that fed into the same Lake Erie on which I’d seen the Lorain Lighthouse. I’d always liked Cleveland. There were good restaurants, a thousand microbreweries, a kickin’ art museum, those cool brick buildings I always wish I had at least one wall of in my house.
It was just over a year after I first sat face-to-face with Sam Little. My research assistant Amaia and I went over the notes in the hotel the night before. I made sure I had the names and dates down:
Cleveland:
Cincinnati:
In both cities, an unmatched confession remained:
Black-and-white photos of the city lined the wood-paneled walls of the courtroom. A plaque on the front of the bench read, JUDGE JOHN J. RUSSO. The flags of the United States of America and the State of Ohio flanked his Aeron chair.
The assistant DA and a paralegal set up their displays, which consisted of excerpts of prosecutor Rick Bell and investigator Jack Bromfield’s interviews with Sam during which he confessed to the murders of Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans. The other boards each represented a victim, including the unidentified woman. They included a shoe, a watch, a ring, a cross, a facial reconstruction, a newspaper article, a pile of autumn leaves I imagine were from the crime scene.
Judge Russo came out of chambers to greet us. We shook hands, and he promised to show us his signed Bruce Springsteen poster later. He was bald, handsome, judicial enough to make you automatically feel like you did something wrong, but chill enough that you’re pretty sure it was jaywalking. He wore a well-tailored gray suit and sneakers. He apologized for his footwear, holding his hands out.
“I was playing basketball and made a shot like a jerk! I’ve got a weight-bearing cast!”
When he left, Amaia and I each dropped into an orange cushioned seat and dug in our purses for notebooks, pens, phones.
Colorful blobs floated across a seventy-inch flat-screen TV. A few local reporters filed into the press box. A couple more with laptops or notebooks sat in the seats farthest from us. One white-haired man fell asleep with his fingers still on his keyboard.
I craned my head toward the door to see a family member, a friend, anyone not media. There is a lot of talk about “closure for families” being the purpose of a courtroom hearing, the purpose of investigating cold cases in general. Watch any true-crime documentary. It’s the go-to for detectives and prosecutors: we do it for the families.
A detective in Charleston once told me, “I say that sometimes, because it’s easy and takes less explaining to the press. The truth. Family or no family, I work for God’s children.”
For a full fifteen minutes after the last local reporter ambled into the courtroom, the door of the court never opened again. I suppose I hadn’t expected it to.
We stood for the judge.
There was the usual fiddling with the Skype before a blurry Sam appeared with a female defense attorney on either side of him, framed by the concrete blocks of the prison interview room. Holland appeared close to the screen and said hi to Rick Bell.
Sam had arranged through the federal government to be guaranteed no death penalty. He required a letter stating as much from each prosecutor in order to secure his confession. He was far from stupid and knew he’d never be executed. He was seventy-nine years old, in poor health, and incarcerated in California. Since the death penalty was struck down, then reinstated a few months later in 1972, there have been only thirteen executions. The last, at San Quentin, was in 2006, and there are currently 707 inmates on California’s death row, with a gubernatorial moratorium on executions. Even if Sam was in Florida or Texas or Indiana, where they execute enthusiastically, it takes an average of fifteen years for a capital case to move through the appeals process.
Sam was playing games, making people jump through hoops and promise him things. Just as I’d promised him I’d be in the courtroom when he pled, and he decided on a gesture—a secret signal. I would tell him if he’d done it or not, and then he would know if I was telling the truth. He did the signal and looked into the camera.
PTSD symptoms vary widely. One of mine is my skin goes numb.
I pinched my thigh as hard as I could, a trick to bring me back from my limbic brain. I was relieved it hurt. The hypothalamus, the amygdala, the thalamus, the hippocampus: danger, need, bald emotion. Fight. Flight. Freeze. I sometimes snap a rubber band on my wrist. When I was a teenager, I used a fork on my thigh, but I don’t recommend that. The pinch is a happy medium and can sometimes wake me up, or it can feel like nothing at all. When I get nothing at all, I take notes upon notes so I don’t lose hours in a traumatized fugue state.
When we rose for the judge, Amaia and I spontaneously clasped hands. We weren’t touchy-feely on a daily basis, but we had spent a long time together with a lot of dead women. There were also too many we hadn’t met yet and many we never would. It haunted me. If I could just be brighter, harder, more relentless, I could find them. I knew it wasn’t my job. It wasn’t my place. It wasn’t the time. I had a book to finish. I had young children.
Sam and his counsel, Mary K. Tylee and Terri Webb, identified themselves. Almost everyone who sits next to Sam unconsciously leans away from him as if repelled by a force field. When I encountered disgust around my rapport with Sam, I believe it was simply a reaction to the fact that I didn’t lean away. It wasn’t normal.
I wasn’t on trial for being abnormal. Sam was on trial for committing multiple murders.
The judge confirmed Sam had ample time to consult with counsel.
Richard Bell for the State of Ohio, Cuyahoga County, representing prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley, identified himself.
For the next hour or so, we watched Judge Russo patiently explain constitutional rights to a hard-of-hearing, old psycho. Russo was concise, not condescending, repeating himself several times with different verbiage. Sam indicated he understood his right to a defense, what exactly was meant by a right to a trial by a jury of his peers, what it meant to waive that right. Judge Russo explained what constituted “reasonable doubt” and then broke down each of the ten charges and the potential penalties.
JUDGE: And then, finally, Mr. Little, you have a Constitutional right here in the United States to remain silent. Nobody could force you to testify against yourself. The state could never force you to the witness stand, your lawyers could never force you to the witness stand. And, in fact, sir, I could not force you to the witness stand. The state of Ohio could never use that against you. So, they couldn’t say to a jury—Hey, Mr. Little didn’t testify. So, the guy must be guilty. Nobody could ever comment about your right to remain silent. Do you understand you give that right up when you change your plea?
LITTLE: Yes, sir.
It was a script, but there are different ways to deliver lines. It’s impossible to be a fair and impartial anything. We take our best shot. Russo listened hard, took Sam’s responses seriously, and presided over a respectful proceeding for a man many would argue didn’t deserve one.
JUDGE: Finally, if you have a question of me, something you don’t understand, please make sure you ask. Because, at the end, I want to be very clear that your plea is being offered to this court, knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily, okay, sir?
LITTLE: Yes, sir.
JUDGE: And then, finally, the state of Ohio and counsel for yourself, sir, agreed that your time would be run consecutive to the sentences handed down in the following cases. There were two cases in Hamilton County that you plead guilty to today. Case number 1902957, 1902543. There’s a case in Los Angeles, California. That is case, B as in boy, A…as in Angela, 400148. And a case out of Texas, Ector County Texas, uh…
The room paused and there was a mad shuffling of papers. The original Denise Brothers case number was missing.
“Hang on there just a second,” said Holland from his end.
Amaia and I scrolled.
“Let’s get it first.”
“Shush. Duh.”
In thirteen seconds, we had it. I wrote it down in my notebook, tore out the sheet, and handed it to the assistant DA. TX case # A-18–1415-CR, 70th District CT, Ector County.
Holland showed up a millisecond later with a piece of paper in his hands.
“I believe that’s A as in Adam, 181415CR,” said Bell.
“Well, yes. That is correct. That’s what I have.”
Judge Russo’s tone pivoted a hair, from someone doing their due diligence to someone pronouncing judgment.
JUDGE: All right, so then this afternoon I’ll note for the record that I’m satisfied, that I’ve informed Mr. Little of his Constitutional rights… That he understands the nature of the two offenses that he’s going to change his plea to. The effects of that plea and the maximum penalties the court can impose. I’m also going to find that his plea, this afternoon, is being made knowing, intelligently and voluntarily. Mr. Little, on case 6, 40008, sir, how do you now plead to count one, the aggravated murder charge causing the death with purpose and prior calculation and design of Mary Jo Peyton, sir. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?
LITTLE: Guilty.
JUDGE: All right, sir, I accept your plea to guilty and find you guilty. Sir, how do you plead to count six, aggravated murder where you purposefully, with prior calculation, design, did cause the death of Rose Evans. Guilty or not guilty?
I knew the end from the start, hadn’t expected to shed a single crocodile tear, even for the record. I’d survived having Sam’s brutality poured into my head every day, had cried until I didn’t have a drop of salt water left in me. Amaia stood next to me, stone-faced, very pregnant, in a trench coat and four-inch heels, wielding an arsenal of spreadsheets in her purse. You’d not likely squeeze a tear from that one either.
LITTLE: Guilty.
JUDGE: Alright, sir, I’ll accept your plea to guilty on six and find you guilty.
We both brought our hands to our faces.
Bell acknowledged the assistant prosecutor, Hannah Smith, and their paralegal, Susan Jacobson, thanked law enforcement and Holland, and asked that there be no reduction from aggravated murder and no agreement the sentences be held concurrent to each other or with anything else. He expressed his horror and disbelief at the callousness of the crimes.
TYLEE: Mr. Little sincerely apologizes for the two Cleveland deaths of Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans. He worked intensively with law enforcement officials to provide pertinent information. Which resulted in a resolution of the Cleveland cases. In pleading today, accepting life sentences, he wishes to provide closure to the families of the deceased women as well as ensuring that no one else is falsely charged for his act. He’s making amends in the only way possible under his current incarceration circumstances… To provide any and all information which he possesses. Again, he sincerely apologizes for causing the deaths of Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans.
JUDGE: All right, Mr. Little. You know, I asked Mr. Bell, are we going to have family here? He said to me, Judge, you know, these are such old cases that there aren’t family that either we can find or that want to be here. And that…that just gives pause. Anybody that would have been here has been affected by your actions. The heinous crimes that you committed against these women, all across the United States, have left many people with…what I would say, is a hole in their lives. Some of those people that went to their graves not having closure and this does bring closure to not only Cuyahoga County and to the city of Cleveland and to whatever family members that may still be alive for the Peyton family or the Evans family…it brings closure for you, you’ve accepted responsibility, you have been cooperative. 93 women and the pain and suffering you’ve caused the families from 1970 to 2005… I think all of us here in the courtroom and anybody who would imagine that any one person could commit this type of crime over the course of 34 years is indescribable, unacceptable and again, inhuman. And so, understanding you accepted this responsibility, the court will hand down the sentence as the parties have agreed to hear this afternoon.
Sam was sentenced to two life sentences, to run consecutively with the four he already carried.
Bell was a snazzy dresser, generous with his answers, and proud of the case. His team glowed with it. I’d seen their poster boards. I knew they’d worked hard for this empty courtroom, with no one to cry, hug, and thank them. The People included the people no one showed up for.
The reporters were asking the same questions as usual. How did he evade the police for so long? Why did he do it? They all eventually come around to that sexy beast: evil.
One reporter said, “Okay, and you’re face-to-face with him. Could you feel the evil emanating from him when you looked at him in the face and the eyes? Could you feel human to human that there was something very evil about this man?”
Bell replied, “You felt it when he explained…killing the women. He lives in two different worlds. He’s able to somehow compartmentalize his thoughts and feelings. He’d be talking about the Browns and our great quarterback and what type of season we’re gonna have. He would talk about the burning river. He would talk with fondness about the Cleveland area. But when he would start describing those killings, he would relive them in his mind and uh…at that point in time, yes, Yes, he’d give you a glimpse into the darkness.”
I don’t usually fight my way through reporters shouting questions. But I figured I was there.
“Mr. Bell, do you feel this is representative of a new era, where cold cases are being prioritized and we have the information-sharing capabilities and the science to possibly go back and seek justice for them?”
“I can tell you that in this case, it’s because of the willingness to give the police this information. You have some DNA on the California case or cases. This particular offender here did not usually leave his DNA. The only way to really solve it is being able and willing to play the game. To sit down with him. To peel the onion and see what he might tell you. Then to go back and confirm and corroborate. There’s nothing really new in law enforcement’s strategy. There’s just the diligence and the willingness, and that’s what the investigators had in this case, from the Ranger to the investigator in our office.”
“Was there ever a question in your mind whether or not you would indict?”
“No. We were going to indict. We were going to indict even if he didn’t talk. We were going to find some way to pull these cases together and to indict. We had enough evidence initially that he had done these three killings. We were able to take what little we had and then go back and marry them to the two cases that were unsolved, to those homicide files that we were able to find. We did have some evidence. But in order to prove what was his intent…and the prior calculation and design, the premeditation, we had to be willing to engage in those conversations and learn from them. And that also gave us the corroboration and the confirmation to be able to verify specifics.”
Amaia and I walked the two blocks back to the hotel, where we freshened up, dressed down, and went to meet Betty and Inez for dinner at the Moosehead Saloon.
Over ribs, Betty showed me the tattoo on her arm she’d gotten of the Georgia O’Keeffe orchid on the thank-you note I’d sent her. Amaia and I were exhausted. The ribs were great.
That’s most of what I remember beyond the margaritas. They asked about the trial, eventually. “How many?”
“Ninety-three. Around ninety-three”
“You think that?”
The teenager with the chocolate eyes closed them and slowly shook her head back and forth.
“My mama said he was lying about a lot of that. A lot of that, can’t get her brain wrapped around that. He was a rolling stone. He didn’t stay nowhere long,” said Betty, twirling a lock.
“He did do it, Betty.”
“I know he did, but I don’t think he did as many. How would you remember that?”
“He was good at it.”
“I couldn’t tell you how many times I got my hair done, and it takes a whole day!”
“What about your tattoos? Do you remember getting those?”
“Now, you can ask me about any one of these tattoos on my body, and I can tell you exactly why they’re about, what was happening. Everything here has a meaning.”
“It’s more about that, you know? I mean they’re more like tattoos. He does remember them.”
“They knew he was a criminal and a perv. That uncle he claimed molested him, yeah, he was a well-known perv too, and he got banished to the basement. But it was a couple of girls, not Sammy. My granddad knew something about something, and that’s why he ran him off for good. We can’t do anything for them girls, them people. They gotta live with that pain forever. He gotta figure that out with his maker. I know he loved his family, he painted that in pictures. He painted that picture of me. It’s like, was I on the list?”
I had no idea where the list ended.
“I don’t know.”
Amaia and I visited the Ohio State Reformatory at Mansfield.
OSR, where at seventeen years old, Sam had turned his mattress up to the wall in his cell next to Boxing Betty and learned how to throw a proper right cross. Wilbert, Boxing Betty, is the only person about whom I’ve heard him speak with real tenderness. Boxing Betty is now dead, but there are poems written about her. She was something of a local legend in Cleveland. Everyone loved her rape revenge story. Everyone loved the sissy who was so tough and witty, even in a famously brutal prison, no one would dare touch her. She called Sam a lion. She taught him to box. She saw something in him. It wasn’t the thing that won out.
OSR is now a museum and a tourist attraction. They shot the film The Shawshank Redemption there. Amaia and I had no idea it was Shawshank Redemption weekend. The line to get into this 1886 Victorian stone castle of a former prison wound all the way down the driveway, beside which you could view a remnant of the twenty-five-foot-tall wall that once surrounded it. A carnival with a monster funhouse and a Tilt-A-Whirl was being set up on the extensive grounds. Mannequins dressed in sexy prison guard costumes leaned against food trucks selling Korean tacos.
“Is a Shawshank Redemption carnival a thing?” I asked Amaia, whose bloated feet were blistering in her shoes. I luckily had Band-Aids in my purse, because I was already a mom. “Welcome to life with a first aid kit in your purse. Should you be going in here?”
“Why?”
“Because who knows what kind of mold or asbestos…”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Or ghost slime or…”
“After all this?”
We entered through the Victorian mansion that served as the warden’s quarters until the facility was ordered closed in 1990. Paint peeled from walls inlaid with stained glass windows framed by mahogany moldings.
The library, dining room, and parlor are now lined with historical photos and display cases that include iron shackles and frayed prison uniforms. They preserved the bathroom exactly, with a pink plastic rose in a vase that read HELEN. The last warden’s wife accidentally shot and killed herself while opening a cabinet the wrong way? Because that happens a lot?
In what was the warden’s sitting room, behind a wall of plexiglass, stood “Old Sparky,” a vintage electric chair. Displayed also were with the sponge and harness they used to more efficiently deliver the electric current and the leather hood they put over the condemned men’s—and a few women’s—faces. There was a giant switch on the wall next to Old Sparky, framed by round dressing-room mirror lights.
As far as we could tell by their T-shirts, everyone else visiting that day was a Shawshank enthusiast. There were life-size cardboard cutouts of Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman around every corner for photo ops. I took mine at the dining table, where I sat next to Tim Robbins and pretended to drink from the tin cup glued to the table.
A tunnel led from the warden’s quarters to the main cellblock, where elongated ovals of buttery afternoon light poured through cathedral-high windows. In the middle of the cavernous fortress stood the world’s largest freestanding steel cellblock in the world, made of steel from Lorain. A spiral staircase connected each floor. The only thing between us and the ground was a set of bars. The walkways shook.
I knew from Sam we were in the “penthouse,” where they put the new prisoners until they figured out where they belonged: Sissies? Black guys? White guys? Teachers’ pets? With the guys who would sharpen them up and fast?
I couldn’t decide what was worse: touching a surface in this horrific room or my vertigo. I stood in the tiny cells, paint peeling off the walls, black mold shooting tentacles from every corner.
I’d heard too many of Sam’s stories to stay in the shower room for long. On our way from the shower to solitary, we passed the cell where in 1962, a boy had killed himself by self-immolation. Sam had described the sound, the smell. I counted: bottom floor, north side, three cells in. Sam’s was the one above.
I doubted anyone else there was counting cells to figure out which one had housed a boy who self-immolated and the future serial killer above him, breathing in the ashes.
If I remembered, The Shawshank Redemption was about fairness or the lack of it, justice or the lack of it, friendship, persistence, the ability to think critically under pressure. Maybe freedom? Oh, and probably redemption. If you have to get caught with a crowd of tourists, this was an awfully nice crowd.
In OSR solitary, you can stand in a pitch-black cell and shut the door if you want to see what it was like. I walked into a cell behind a pink-cheeked gal with blue eyeliner and a Shawshank shirt. We barely fit.
“Isn’t this weird?!” she asked me. She turned to her husband. “How many seconds?”
“How many you want?”
She took my hands, pulled me into a huddle.
“Wager something on it.”
“Huh?”
Why does this never occur to people? Why suffer for free?
“Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory,” I said. “Or an anklet from the mall. A foot massage.”
Must I think of everything myself?
Nope. She caught right on and turned around with her eyes all naughty. “How many do you think I can do?”
“Thirty secs max, babe.”
He seemed like a nice, matching husband, in a matching T-shirt. That was a sensible answer.
“I’ll last a minute if you take me to the Cheesecake Factory!”
That’s my girl!
“Okay, babe?”
“Two if you throw in a movie!”
Whoa, there, sister. Slow down. First, never go up that fast. Second, two minutes feels like two hours when you’re frightened.
Manual strangulation can take anywhere from three to ten to fifteen minutes. Faster with a ligature. It can take as long as you want it to. By then, I tended to view minutes in terms of strangulation.
I was now going to be standing in the pitch-dark for two minutes. I’d coached her poorly.
“Are we on?” she said, and I think she might even have done a little Beyoncé thing with her hand. I was sure she’d raise another minute if he agreed to get the popcorn, and three minutes would have been too long.
I filed in behind her and we faced forward. Her husband closed the metal door, and complete darkness engulfed us. I closed my eyes. The jolly blond behind me gasped and grabbed for my shoulder. She scraped her knuckles on the wall with a yelp. When she found my shoulder with her hand, I placed mine on it. The cell smelled like mold and misery. I tried not to retch. I was not going to fuck up the date that woman had coming to her.
Beth Silverman asked the jury at Little’s LA trial to sit in silence for three minutes. To feel how long that is.
When my cellie’s husband opened the door, she and I linked arms and beelined out of the building and into the sun.